Sorry to link and run, but I’m running around like a crazy person between romance promo and editing deadlines. This should amuse you, despite not actually being funny.

Not as exciting as when they lost a ten-year-old kid traveling by herself, but still worth noting. Not that I think United is any worse than the other two airlines still in existence in the US right now. I’m kind of of the opinion that the entire airline system sucks in its effort to squeeze every last penny out of air travelers. We might as well laugh about it. :-)

Okay, so it’s not exactly a book review. Nonetheless, read this and pass it on! “ILU-486” is brilliant near-future short SF by Amanda Ching, sprung from spectre of VA’s medical rape legislation.

Somebody’s called it “The Handmaid’s Tail 2012,” and the description is apt. It’s the best kind of near-future science fiction: radical enough to fascinate us and believable enough to scare us.

It’s short. It’s free. So if you like it, tell the writer. Even better, tell somebody else.

Charles Stross is the only SF writer I’ve discovered in the last ten years about whom I can honestly say I will read just about anything he writes. Because it’s all fascinating. So you can imagine how excited I was today to find he’d written a blog entry speculating on what the world might be like in 2032 and again in 2092. Check it out. :-)

eBooks are massively convenient, but there are certain things many of us miss about good old-fashioned dead tree books. I know I have autographed copies of things I will never let go.

Some distributors are trying to bridge that gap. Including coming up with a way to have your eBooks autographed.

I installed Firefox 5 a day or two ago and was thrilled by the awesome.  I haven’t crashed it since I installed it–I used to crash Firefox 4 two or three times a day. App tabs are wonderful and tab groups are massively convenient. I’m one of those people who tends to bookmark things and never return them again, so tabs have been a wonderful way to keep things I need to deal with in front of me. As soon as I saw that tab groups were available, I was hooked. I put all the tabs for my submission deadlines in one group, all the interesting content I want to mention on my editing blog in another group, and random projects in further groups. And I can bring up any group at any time.

So imagine my surprise when I go to pull up my tab groups this afternoon so I can submit a story, and when I click in a tab group, it disappears. Entirely. I move my groups around to see if I’ve hidden it, and another group disappears.

Did I mention I used to be a computer geek? I know how to fix this kind of crap, and for this, there is no fix.

After an hour of research, no viable fixes, locating my session state backup file from yesterday and making a backup copy of that so I can restore later, I finally brave closing and reopening Firefox. Surprise, all my missing tabs are back . . . but they’re scattered as single tabs all over Panorama (the area where tab groups are stored). At this point, I can live with that, and begin painstakingly rebuilding my groups.

Ninety minutes after I set out to do so, I finally manage to submit the story.

So . . . Firefox 5 = wonderful, but maybe a little unstable yet. If you aren’t crashing regularly, I’d suggest waiting through that usual  update or two before you try it. And if you are . . . the file you want to back up religiously is C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profile.default\sessionrestore.js.  Sessionrestore.bak wouldn’t hurt, either.